Committee highlights delays in the implementation of judgments of the Court

18/05/2017

Legal Affairs and Human Rights

At its meeting in Belgrade, the Legal Affairs Committee deplored the “delays in implementing the Court’s judgments, the lack of political will to implement judgments on the part of certain States Parties and all attempts made to undermine the Court’s authority and the Convention-based human rights protection system”.

The parliamentarians expressed their deep concern over the number of judgments – almost 10,000 – pending before the Committee of Ministers, even though not all these judgments were at the same stage of execution, and drew attention to the increase in the number of leading cases – revealing specific structural problems – which had been awaiting execution for more than five years.

The report by Pierre-Yves Le Borgn’ (France, SOC), the 9th on this issue, adopted by the committee, states that even though considerable progress has been made, Italy, the Russian Federation, Turkey, Ukraine, Romania, Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Moldova and Poland “have the highest number of non-implemented judgments and still face serious structural problems”.

The committee therefore once again called on States Parties to fully and swiftly implement the judgments and to co-operate with the Committee of Ministers, the Court and the Department for the execution of judgments as well as with other Council of Europe organs and bodies, and recommended a series of measures to strengthen this co-operation. It also called on national parliaments to set up “structures guaranteeing follow-up to and monitoring of international obligations in the human rights field, and in particular of the obligations stemming from the Convention”.

Since its Resolution 1226 (2000), the Parliamentary Assembly has been contributing to the supervision of the implementation of judgments of the Court; its last examination of this matter was in 2015.